By: Kelly Rouba
Dr. Nathaniel Williams has made quite a name for himself as a successful self-help author, motivational speaker, CEO, and television and radio personality. But when someone once asked how he’d like to be remembered someday if he could only have one word written on his tombstone, his reply wasn’t any of the aforementioned titles but simply the word “strategist.”
As a child who grew up in foster care after his mother passed away when he was only five years old, Williams faced more challenges than most children his age. But at about 11 years old, he decided that he didn’t want to rely on other people to give him what he needed; instead, he wanted to achieve success on his own.
This realization came after Williams told Sister Mary Patrick, the executive director of the foster care program, how disappointed he felt when his sisters and brothers weren’t able to come visit him one day.
“She wore her compassion on her sleeve,” Williams fondly recalls. After hearing I was upset, “she went down to the store room and came up these ten steps carrying a bicycle, and she gave me the bicycle. I was just as happy as can be.”
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After returning to his room, Williams said it dawned on him that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life telling sad stories and hoping to get something in return. He then began thinking about how powerful Sister Mary Patrick was in her role and decided he wanted to be just like her.
“What I started doing was signing my name, Nathaniel J. Williams, Executive Director, because that was what Sister Mary Patrick was. It took 13 years for that to become my official title, but that’s what taught me something.”
Today, Williams resides in Northampton County, PA and, among his many endeavors, he is the President and CEO of HumanWorks Affiliates, Inc. (HWA), which runs a variety of programs for people with disabilities, children in placement, and other social service agencies throughout the state. HWA also offers office management services for non-profit and provider agencies.
“HumanWorks is a cluster of non-profits, and 70 percent of the non-profits are non-profits that serve people with disabilities,” Williams said, adding, “We have a fair amount of residential programs for adults with disabilities as well as some day programs.”
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Williams was about 16 years old when he entered into the field by working as a recreational aide at St. Jude Habilitation Institute in Westchester, NY. “That was my first entry into a job but also into Human Services, and I really liked it,” he said, noting, “After I graduated, I went on to work in a group home, again in New York, for adults with mental retardation.”
According to Williams, his entire career has been centered around working with individuals with developmental disabilities. Outside of work, Williams is also an advocate for people with disabilities and serves on numerous Boards, including the Pennsylvania Association of Rehabilitation Facilities (PARF). He has also served on the Pennsylvania Developmental Disabilities Council for about 10 years and on the Office of Developmental Programs’ Planning Advisory Committee for about 12 years, of which he was once co-chair.
Now 46 years old, Williams admits that he felt life got better as he got older. His advice to others who aren’t content with their life is to simply hang in there. “Sometimes it just takes time for things to come together,” he said, adding, “Playing the game long enough makes playing the game win-able. It’s not so often you win on the very first try.”
During workshops, “what I try to encourage people when I speak to them is to study success. People study failure too often, especially when I’m working with people about personal development. We live our lives and we look to the lens of how we’ve been hurt, not how we’ve been inspired.
“I try to look at those things that are motivating and inspiring because I think that that is the thing that moves us forth. If we start looking at the ways we’ve been hurt or challenged, it shuts down the party.”
And Williams says achieving success also involves “developing a strategy to think about ‘How do I get this done?’
“Whatever the challenge we have—and we all have challenges to different degrees and sometimes people with disabilities have more of an obvious challenge that they’re experiencing—most people have challenges, (but) the question is, how do we strategize to deal with that that at the same time maximizes the situation instead of turns it into something that’s less. To me, it’s an issue of strategy and developing fellowship with other people and trying to fight the urge you’re alone.”
Williams adds, “My encouragement to people, especially when it starts to get a little rocky, is to try to slow it down. Understand it’s about a strategy.”
In his latest book called Attaining Your Personal Best, Williams also tells people to work on getting “MAD,” which stands for Mindset, Attitude, and Demeanor. “When people say, ‘Don’t get mad, get even,’ we believe that you can even out the playing field by really trying to understand them as well as understanding yourself.”
Williams believes that in certain types of situations, the problem can be resolved by changing one’s mindset. He recalled an incident where students with disabilities had difficulty registering for classes at one college in Pennsylvania because they had to go to three different offices to complete the process.
After the Vice President of Student Affairs engaged in role-playing as a person with a disability and went through the process of registering, he was able to experience their challenges firsthand. “He clearly understood he had a major problem and he cleaned it up,” Williams said. “Sometimes it’s really just getting that person’s mindset to be somewhat changed and it affects their attitude and demeanor in the way that they interact with others.”
As both a Human Services recipient and administrator and as the father of a son with autism, Williams feels blessed to be able to see disability-related matters from three different perspectives.
“Having been in the system as a recipient, I think that gives you one perspective. The chance to be an administrator gives you another perspective and then again, in the role of a parent, gives you another. If I look around at a lot of my colleagues, I recognize that sometimes their inability to understand some of the challenges and ways to deal with it is because I think their perspective is somewhat one-sided.”
As an advocate for people with developmental disabilities, Williams tries to push for change in a system he sees as flawed. “I think there’s no question that when we look at the system, there are some major challenges the system faces,” he said, adding, “I think that the system was built and had origins in so many things that were wrong. A lot of it has origins in wanting to hide people with disabilities away and wanting to congregate them because that saved money. We still have a lot of remnants of that system in place and part of my advocating is for people to say, ‘We did the best we could based on what we had then.’”
Williams also would like to see less people with developmental disabilities housed in group homes. “Let’s have an awareness and awakening now that even our models of congregate group homes of three and four people that come together and that really don’t know each other, it’s still based on a lot of those same principles that had those large institutions in place.
“Pennsylvania is wonderful in that they don’t like to do anything more than three and four. I worked in a state like New York, where they prided themselves on having 12, 14, or 16 bed programs. So reality is, I believe, that lots of times, community programs hold up a mirror and look at the institution and just reflect it back, but it’s smaller and in the community and they feel better about it.”
Presently, Williams feels many service providers and State agencies make people go through unnecessary iterations instead of just asking what the person with the developmental disability needs. “Why don’t we just give them a look at our lives and the lives of people that aren’t dependent on the system and get their lives as much as possible and as much as they’re capable and interested in to mirror the life that everybody else has?”
Williams said he believes in doing right by people with developmental disabilities and that includes giving them and their families a choice on what living situation is best suited for them. And while, “I learned that to do the right thing generally takes more time, money, and other resources,” Williams said, “I think when we work together and I think that when we agree that something has to be done, it’s amazing to watch how things begin to change.”
In that regard, Williams plans to keep advocating among service providers “just to keep raising…awareness and sensitivity—not to beat them down, but to say, ‘Hey, we have our work set out and we want to keep some principles that we want to operate by and keep comparing what we are doing to those principles.”
Williams has also taken his advocacy to the airwaves and discussed disability-related issues, such as autism, on about six episodes of his weekly television talk show called Navigating Your Life. On the show, “our goal is not to talk about the dramatic effects and the downside (of having a disability). It’s really to try to give people an uplifting message about what people’s capabilities are rather than what their challenges and disabilities are,” Williams said.
Williams also strives to inspire those who attend his motivational workshops and always appreciates the chance to get to speak to an audience of people who have disabilities. His workshops mostly focus on human interactions, but he also speaks on a range of topics, from self-management to stress management to cultural diversity.
In fact, Williams recently left for a 19-day tour sponsored by Armed Forces Entertainment that spans across Europe and the Mediterranean. On the tour, he plans to stress the importance of the five Rs to the troops, which are respect, responsibility, recognition, renewal, and resilience. Too often, we minimize the importance of words and changing mindset, he said.
Williams also reminds people to keep an upbuilding attitude and to try to find inspiration behind even the most difficult situations. The day his brothers and sisters didn’t come to visit, Williams said he recognized he needed to look at life in a way that he’d be inspired by the situation rather than feel hurt, not wanted, and not connected and that it made all the difference. “I didn’t look at how I was hurt; I looked at how I was inspired and I think it changed my life.”
To learn more about Dr. Nathaniel Williams, visit: www.nj-williams.com
